gettin' hyphae with mycelium

What do you think is the largest living thing in the world?

A blue whale? They are indeed the largest animal that has ever lived...can grow up to 108 feet long and 172 metric tons...

A giant sequoia? General Sherman, at 274 ft high and 108 ft in circumference, contains 52,584 cubic feet of wood...

So that's it, right? Plants and animals?

Oh wait, there's bacteria and archaea and fungi, too. Of course bacteria and archaea are microscopically small, but there's no way that there's a mushroom bigger than a giant sequoia, right?

As epic as that would be, the answer is no. However, what you see when mushroom hunting is just the ephemeral fruiting body, the distributor of spores, and far less than the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The bulk of a fungus is actually underground, in a dense network of cells called a mycelium. There are a few really cool things about mycelium: 1)it's made up of cells called hyphae, which are all pretty much identical, 2)strands of these hyphae are only one cell thick, 3)hyphal growth is directed by organelles called "spitzenkörper" (which is just a really cool word) and 4)the cobweb-like structure of mycelium can be so dense that a single cubic inch of soil can contain up to eight miles of hyphae!

Since the majority of a fungus is a spongy mesh of single-celled tubes underground, it can absorb nutrients and water directly from its surroundings, it's pretty well protected, and it doesn't need to hold itself up. These factors should allow it to grow pretty much indefinitely... and it does, in some cases.

Up in the Malheur National Forest of eastern Oregon, there's a giant network of genetically identical mycelium that spans... 8.9 square kilometers. Almost three and a half square miles. Not only that, but it's estimated to be 2400 years old. Dude.

But let's take that density thing and run with it. Eight miles of hyphae in a cubic inch of soil means that there's a lot of criss-crossing fibers, hundreds or maybe thousands of layers thick, forming a redundant, resilient network, like kevlar... or fiberglass insulation...

Hey, what if we could do something with that? What if we grew a bunch of super-dense mycelium into forms that we could use, and then dried it, so that we'd have a really tough custom-shaped material for, say, structural strength, or insulation, or packaging? We could build things out of it, or keep our houses warm, or ship fragile things in it... and since it's made of mushrooms, we could just throw it away or compost it, and it would be completely biodegradable!

Well, lucky for us, such a thing does exist. A bunch of non-scientists engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute came up with this idea, and have turned it into a couple products, called Greensulate™ and EcoCradle™.

To make this kind of fungal Styrofoam, they take byproducts of agricultural crops, such as cotton burrs or buckwheat hulls, load them up with fungal spores and fungus food, and let 'em grow. After a few weeks, the hyphae have surrounded and consumed the agricultural byproducts, forming that dense mycelium. As it grows, the mycelium fills out whatever mold it's started in, whether that's in the form of a brick, a large flat panel, or a custom shape that perfectly fits whatever product you need to carefully package.

Once it has grown to the proper size and shape, they cook it to render it "biologically inert," which is a fancy engineer way of saying "dead." Depending on the proportion of ag byproducts and fungal spores they use, they can change the properties of the "fungoam" (I just made that up) to make it harder or softer. Grown in the right proportions, they can actually make this stuff stronger than concrete, but a whole lot lighter. Plus, it's mold- and moisture-resistant, is a better thermal and vibration insulator than Styrofoam, and it's fireproof!



This stuff is super eco-friendly, too. Not only is it made from living things that require no light and only room-temperature heat (requiring one tenth of the energy of synthetic foam), but

"The raw material inputs of EcoCradle™ are selected based on regionally available agricultural by-products. So a factory in Texas or China might use cotton seed hulls, and a factory in Virginia or Spain might use rice husks and soybean hulls. By manufacturing regionally, and using local feedstocks, we aim to minimize the trucking of raw and finished materials." (http://www.ecovativedesign.com)

Since it's made of fungus instead of synthetic materials, after you're done with it, you can just throw it in your compost and return it to the environment whence it came, returning its nutrients to the soil to fuel the next generation of fungus.

According to Ecovative Design, EcoCradle™ is going to be protecting a soon to be shipped unnamed product, and their website shows packaging for some cylindrical device, but presumably, with a large enough mold, they could make anything, like entire buildings! Or Paul Bunyan statues! Or life-size models of General Sherman!

Paddy

Check out:
http://www.ecovativedesign.com/
http://www.ecovativedesign.com/press/publications/download/Popular_Science.pdf

via Time

the details

I read an article the other day about how people are forming online support groups to cope with the depression that sets in after they watch Avatar and subsequently think they'll never see something so beautiful anywhere other than Pandora.

To you sullen homebodies, I say this: get yourself a microscope, a black light, and some scuba gear, and come with me.

A marine biologist and a designer have started a little company called Morphologic Studios in Miami, Florida, with the mission of bringing to light the beautiful living art that exists right here on Earth, specifically in the form of microscopic coral reef-dwellers. They've just started a blog of videos of these vibrant little creatures, including a number of different invertebrates, from crabs and shrimp to corallimorph polyps and Christmas Tree Worms. For those of you who have seen Avatar multiple times (I'm up to twice so far, including in IMAX 3D), you'll be happy to know that the latter is the inspiration for those giant flowers that disappear when you touch them.

I'm always excited to find kindred spirits who agree that the most beautiful art comes not from a brush, a pencil, or a hammer, but from the oldest tool in the world: evolution.

'The Christmas Tree Worm' from MORPHOLOGIC on Vimeo.

paddy

via boing boing thanks to liam

picture this

Y'know how Spider-man had that "spider sense," where he could tell when something probably large and no doubt painful was about to smack him from behind? Do you ever get that feeling?

Maybe it's just me. And radioactive spiders, of course.

Anyway, let's try a little experiment:

Take a look around... maybe you're sitting at a desk, maybe you're in bed, maybe you're on a boat or a bus or a plane or on horseback (you'd better not be driving, though... there are laws against reading science blogs while driving cars or operating horses). Memorize your surroundings, looking at the people and the things around you, how big they are, and how far they are away from you. Without sounding too much like a hippie, I want you to close your eyes and try to "feel" the distance between you and your computer screen, between you and the closest light, between you and the nearest exit in the event of an emergency. Maybe you can picture in your head what it would look like from outside your body, to see the distance between you and that thing. Go ahead, try it out, close your eyes. Feel it.




Okay, now, open them.



Um, open them.


[This is a problem. Perhaps I should start video blogging...]


Well, I'm going to assume you're all here, with eyes open again. That was lovely, wasn't it? I could picture in my head the things in my room, almost sensing their presence and proximity to me.

Let's go up in scale a bit, and picture yourself inside your house, or your apartment, your boat, your office building, or your horse paddock. Picture how big (or small) you are relative to those things, how you might look to the bird up on the telephone pole. Now picture how big you'd look if someone could see your entire town, or city, or if they were flying overhead at a few thousand feet. You'd be pretty tiny, right?

Now picture yourself, your big muscles and your fine tall stature that your grandmother is so proud of, relative to the size of the entire known universe.

Can you do it? I can't. I think my head would explode.

Maybe this video will help. It was created by the American Museum of Natural History to demonstrate just how big the universe as we know it really is. Using sophisticated computer technology (probably Mathematica on a Mac), they've created a scale map of everything in the cosmos we know about, starting from the Himalayas (tallest mountains on Earth, in case ya didn't hear) and zooming out to the remnant energy of the Big Bang.

What I find particularly interesting is that they've shown just how far out our first radio waves have broadcast. They should be hearing Al Jolson over at the center of the galaxy in the next 70,000 years or so.



Stuff like this makes me want to cry a little bit, for a number of reasons:
1. The universe is so impossibly large, with so many stars and so many planets, that I can't believe that the evolution of life as we define it is unique to our planet,
2. Even if there are other "civilizations" out there, we'll never meet them, as they wouldn't even pick up our earliest radio waves for another couple billion years, and
3. By that time, the Sun will have swallowed up the Earth.
4. Furthermore, on the scale of the known universe, where it takes light so incredibly long to travel between two points, and our own galaxy is but a mere speck in the sky from anywhere else, it really doesn't matter if your socks match today.
5. And your life comprises such a short time on such an inconsequential ball of dirt (during which light will travel practically nowhere), that your existence will have essentially no impact on the history of the universe, so it really doesn't matter if that really cute and popular girl with the blond hair and braces snubbed your request to go to the middle school dance with you. Get back to work on that FTL drive in your mom's basement.

In sum, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvpcOqSK7YU


paddy

an inspiration speaks

coho restoration

Salmon all along the west coast have had a rough time for many years. Since the gold rush, salmon populations have been steadily declining due a combination of historical and current factors, including stream diversion, damming, mining, timber harvesting, agricultural runoff, and overfishing in addition to natural predation, drought, and climate change. Salmon numbers have gotten so low that California and Oregon had to completely shut down the 2008 and 2009 salmon fishing seasons. Coho salmon have had a particularly rough time, to the point that the Central California Evolutionarily Significant Unit is now on the Endangered Species List. In central California, the only remaining viable population is in Lagunitas Creek in western Marin county, and even there, the annual return is but a small fraction of historic runs. A little farther north, in the Russian River watershed that spans Sonoma and Mendocino counties, the return has been so small that restoration efforts have expanded to the artificial stocking of local creeks with juvenile Coho salmon.

The Russian River Coho Salmon Captive Broodstock Program (we'll call it the Coho program) is working to supplement the wild Russian River Coho population in the hope of restoring it to a sustainable size. Since 2001, NOAA, CDFG, and the US Army Corps of Engineers has been breeding Coho salmon at Warms Springs Hatchery just below Lake Sonoma and releasing them as juveniles into local creeks that feed the Russian River. The young fish, released as parr, grow up in the creeks for about a year before they turn into smolts, when they head out into the ocean to get a lot bigger. After 2-3 years in the ocean, some adults return to their natal creeks to spawn and create the new generation of fish.

Lil' baby Coho

I recently started a one-year volunteer position with Conservation Corps North Bay working at University of California Cooperative Extension in Sonoma County. The mission of UCCE is to establish working relationships between UC researchers and farmers, natural resource managers, and the community to apply the resources of a world-class university to real-world problems. UCCE's role in the Coho program is to evaluate the efficacy of the program and apply advances in scientific knowledge to its management.

One of the ways we're evaluating whether the program is working is by monitoring the development of the young parr, how many fish are going out to the ocean, and who's coming back. There are a number of neat ways we're doing this.

Since 2004, the Coho program has been releasing increasing numbers of fish into the watershed, starting with 6,160 in 2004. This year, we'll end up releasing about 81,000 baby Coho into a variety of creeks in the watershed, with about 29,000 going into Mill Creek, west of Healdsburg (If that sounds like a lot, consider that historic statewide Coho populations used to number in the hundreds of thousands, and each spawning female produces hundreds of eggs). All of these fish have coded wires implanted in their noses. When they return as adults, spawn and die, we can retrieve the wire, read the code, and figure out where they were put in. But what if we want to find out who's going where while they're still alive and swimming around?

Stocking a creek with a backpack full of fish

For that, we insert little tags called Passively Integrated Transponders, which are just like the microchips we put in dogs and cats and old people. When the juvenile fish swim downstream or the adults swim back up and the tags pass through the sensory field of an antenna, they broadcast an individually identifiable number, which the antenna records along with date and time. Of the 81,000 fish we're letting go, 4,000 of them have these PIT tags, acting as a representative sample of the overall population. When we learn about a PIT-tagged fish leaving or returning, we can make assumptions about the rest of the overall population.

So what do our antennae look like? We use two main kinds: hand-held ones that look and act like metal detectors, and large stationary ones that span the creeks and detect any fish swimming through them.

A stationary antenna

We also monitor for fish by walking the creeks looking for juveniles, adults, and redds (fish nests), snorkeling in the frigid water, and by trapping them on their ways in or out.

As a research assistant, I get to do all sorts of cool things, and my job pretty much requires me to walk around in waders all day, every day. Some days I'm measuring stream flows and changing batteries on the antennae, other days I'm working on setting up traps or scanning for fish, and other days, as I have been for the past week and a half, I don backpacks full of fish and help release them into the creeks. As the year progresses and the rains fill the creeks, I'll be doing a lot more walking spawner surveys, snorkeling, and measuring the fish.

At work

This year I'll be working on a video of my experiences with the Coho program, but in the mean time, you can check out this great video by KQED's Quest on the restoration program:


QUEST on KQED Public Media.

I get to work with Ben White at the hatchery, and there are also some special cameos by my friends Andrew and Julie measuring and PIT-tagging at 8:47, and Louise, who helped start the monitoring project, at 9:18. At 9:38 you can see our trap on lower Mill Creek.

(Incidentally, the scenic waterfall you see at 9:48/9:58 is actually a privately-owned man-made concrete waterfall that creates a major barrier to upstream migration, preventing many salmon from returning to the streams whence they came. It's pretty though, isn't it?)

In good news, University of Washington researchers have said that this year should be a good one for Coho salmon, based on a strong coastal upwelling, cold water, and plenty of yummy copepods. Fingers crossed that we get a good return!

Paddy